NIMC releases identification number for 26 million Nigerians

The National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) on Monday, announced that it had registered 21,360,000 Nigerians, in the National Identity Database and issued them the National Identification Number (NIN).

“The new enrolment figure was reached at the close of work on September 6, 2017,” the NIMC said in a statement.

“The commission has also set up more enrolment centres across the 36 states of the federation and the Federal Capital Territory, bringing the number of enrolment centres to about 805.

It also read: “With the deployment of additional enrolment centres, the NIMC is currently active in 556 local government areas, and is working to activate dormant centres in the remaining 218 LGAs in order to expand enrolment coverage.

“This is in line with the Director-General/Chief Executive Officer of the commission, Aliyu Aziz’s goal to register 28 million Nigerians in the database by the end of December, 2017.”

According to Aziz, NIMC has continued to record exponential growth in the population of the database, despite the many challenges it is facing.

He added that the commission had just over seven million NINs in the database, when he took over in November 2015.

“Despite the challenges and constraints, the director-general who is undaunted, has continued to manage the scarce resources, to ensure that the database is populated before commencing enforcement of the mandatory use of the NIN for all identity-based transactions,” the statement added.